


I Am My Own Wall, Myself

by the_original_n_chan



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Divergence, Gen, Historia Is a Goddess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-13 14:34:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1230022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_original_n_chan/pseuds/the_original_n_chan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Historia is changing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Am My Own Wall, Myself

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Historia's backstory as revealed up through chapter 54.
> 
> Disclaimer: All rights reserved to the original creators. No copyright infringement is intended.

 

 

Historia first notices while standing at the line of sinks, just around dawn, Mikasa still half asleep next to her, toothbrush dangling from her mouth, Sasha already bouncing out the washroom door, on the way to get dressed. Historia bends and spits, then frowns as she straightens. Reaching up, she probes the tight place behind her neck, the stiffness—no, the rigidity, beyond the cramp of tension that she’s become so used to, ever since her tiny snowglobe world broke down in pieces all around her. This hardness is something new, a line that runs across the back of her shoulders, up the slopes of her trapezius muscles to somewhere just below the base of her skull. She rubs at it; her fingertips dig into the skin—

Barely. And no deeper.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t tell anyone. The hardness spreads, day by day, widening across her shoulderblades, creeping in runnels down either side of her spine, anchoring in her ribs, and she doesn’t say a word. She keeps her hair down and loose in the baths at night, while she stumbles half-dressed through the morning routine, wears her uniform cape when she can, even off duty, an extra layer to hide her changing body. She can feel her muscles altering from the constant strain of resistance, growing stronger, broadening her shoulders, bunching in her arms, taut as the steel cables that sing each time they fly.

When she breaks Eren’s collarbone during hand to hand practice, it doesn’t make her feel strong. It makes her feel empty, desperate, alone.

_This is not her. This is not who she is._

After the first bout of swearing, Eren just laughs, surprised but appreciative (and he’s already healed the break by the time everyone else has gotten over their shock). Eren has never begrudged anyone for being stronger, faster, better than he is; he wears his admiration openly, and she can see him already excited for the next time, ready to try his skills again.

 _You’ll have to show me how you’ve been training lately_ , he says, and Jean snorts, declaring scornfully, _Yeah, right—don’t you think that it’s totally hopeless, a guy like you trying to equal a goddess?_

She flinches out from beneath Jean’s hand before it can come to rest on her shoulder and flees the training ground for the stables, where she curries her horse’s coat needlessly, then hides her face in the warm arch of its neck. Down the long line of stalls, the other horses huff and sigh, shift their feet, rip hay from the hanging nets and munch contemplatively. Her mind wanders back to hours spent playing alone at her grandparents’ ranch, turning the hay loft into her castle while summer rain drummed on the old barn’s roof. The hay bales became great halls, staffed by her battered, hand-me-down toys and graced with occasional kitten courtiers, their stepped balconies looking grandly out on all the realms she could imagine as hers, and there were never any Titans at those open gates.

So small it all seems, now that she’s left it behind.

When she leaves the stable at last, early twilight has fallen; dry wisps of straw, breeze-caught, rustle on the empty courtyard’s stones. The world is still too vast, too full of terrors, but she wonders what has changed, what is changing in her.

For so long, she had had nothing. No place to go, nowhere to return. No past, no present, no hope of a future beyond a good death, a pure one.

Nothing, until Ymir.

 

* * * *

 

She dreams of Ymir, of course. Or perhaps more accurately, of Ymir’s absence.

That mountain in winter, in the ceaseless, flying snow.... 

Standing at the cliff’s brink, the lights of the base far below her, she can feel the mountain’s bones beneath her feet, still but somehow thrumming; she can feel the dark basalt ridges thrusting upward, hard and intransigent as her own bleak yearning—or maybe she _is_ that rock, maybe it’s part of her own flesh now, like the crumbling stones of Utgard forever falling, like the concentric rings of the Walls whose child she is. 

And what she yearns for now....

_Oh, Ymir!_

_She would have been your Krista. You wanted her to be your Historia. Or...to be her own Historia._

She doesn’t even know what that means, but somehow...it fills up her heart with light.

The snow has blown through; the heavens blaze with constellations, a million flowering fires in a space as black as Ymir’s Titan’s eyes. They seem so close, more than close enough to touch. And when she reaches up, _up_ , stretches her arms toward that sky, she sees her fingers silhouetted, like crenellations rising against the stars.

She is awake, then, reaching up toward the ceiling of the bunkroom with a faint gasp, the pale skin of her arm awash in moonlight. She sits up, still reaching out for a moment, then lets her hand fall. Hugging her knee to her chest, she rubs at her bare shoulder, then her upper arm, pressing her fingers over the scattered tiny bumps, hard nodules of armor freckling beneath the skin—and she starts, catching the moon’s glint in dark, half-lidded eyes, Mikasa awake on the other side of the room, watching her without expression.

Turning to face the wall, Historia lies down again, bows her head, and pulls the covers up to her chin.

She is suddenly, strangely, not afraid at all.

 

* * * *

 

Wall Rose stretches away for miles on either side of her, the parallel tracks of its cannons vanishing into the distance, their slight curve too subtle to be seen. To her right, the setting sun kisses the earth, round and red in a veil of clouds. The Garrison soldiers have gone down into Trost, talking of food and beer, lovers or families, the Titans forgotten with the day. No one has seen her there, standing at the edge, one tiny figure staring out over Maria’s abandoned, slowly dimming fields.

The wind stirs her tied-back hair; she fingers the controls of her maneuver gear, conscious of the familiar sway of the sheaths as she moves. At her back, the pack of stolen supplies, two extra cylinders of gas strapped to it—she can’t even feel the weight. She is strong now, nobody knows how strong, even she doesn’t know it yet. She hasn’t found the limits of what she can do.

Of what only she can do....

She knows what a death wish feels like; this isn’t it. This is something larger, wilder, an exultation rising up beneath her ribs. The Survey Corps has all she can give to them, an unwanted child’s few scraps of knowledge; what she has left to give, she gives to herself, from herself.

_“Live your life with your head held high....”_

Maybe she’s had to become her own protection, before she could hope to protect anyone else.

Turning her head, she looks with unerringly certainty toward the south, where five years ago the human world was broken. To Shiganshina first, the ruined district, the breach in Wall Maria that pulls at her like a hook in the heart, even though she can’t say why or how. And when she’s finished there, if she hasn’t found what she’s looking for, then—who knows?

The Walls are wide, but the world is wider by far. And somewhere, out there....

_“No matter what kind of world it is, I’m not afraid!”_

With Ymir’s name on her lips, Historia sets her grapples in the Wall and steps out into the sky.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh, what exactly is going on here?
> 
> 1) Historia is turning into a Titan.  
> 2) Historia is turning into a Wall (?).  
> 3) Historia is turning into a Wall Titan.  
> 4) Historia is turning into some kind of awesome Wall Goddess.  
> 5) Historia has completely lost her mind.
> 
> I don't even know, you guys; this came to me in a dream.  
> *I’m voting for #4, though.
> 
>  
> 
> (BTW, it was originally going to be Sasha falling asleep at the sinks in the first scene, but then I thought, no, she's a hunter, she's probably been getting up at the ass crack of dawn for her whole life, and I-don't-do-mornings Mikasa struck me as funny.)


End file.
